


Our Best Days

by M J Holyoke (wholeyolk)



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Arnold Weber's POV, Chocolate Box Exchange 2019, Getting Back Together, M/M, Not A Happy Ending, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-14
Updated: 2019-02-14
Packaged: 2019-10-07 22:11:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 389
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17374175
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wholeyolk/pseuds/M%20J%20Holyoke
Summary: “What if our best days are behind us?” Robert had mused one evening, not long ago.





	Our Best Days

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chronology](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chronology/gifts).



Arnold had always believed that adulthood meant freedom. Freedom from the rules and strictures of childhood, freedom to imagine brave new possibilities and realize them, freedom to make and remake oneself, to become . . . well, _anything_.

Robert, however, thought differently.

“What if our best days are behind us?” Robert had mused one evening, not long ago. They’d spent the past fourteen hours straight dealing with a catastrophic coding error in the latest version of the hosts’ core programming, and now they were tired. Too tired, almost, to remember to taste the fine bottle of brandy they were ostensibly sharing. “Perhaps some days will be better than others,” Robert had continued, “but what if, overall, the arc of our narrative is downward, the diminution and diminution and diminution of possibility until nothing remains but a single, narrow path of unendurable suffering?”

They’d been lovers once. Sometimes, Arnold wondered if he’d been Robert’s first. It was, he was forced to admit, a distinct possibility. He remembered what it had felt like, wrapped in Robert’s ardent embrace and buried deep in Robert’s body, the warm shudder of Robert’s breath against his cheek as he came, the beautiful, clear blue of Robert’s eyes, so trusting and open and _his_. _Arnold’s_. Sometimes, Arnold wished he hadn’t lost interest in Robert and drifted away, distracted by what possibilities lay, still unseen, still unrealized, just beyond the horizon line.

The little boy was to be Arnold’s greatest gift to Robert. He represented Robert’s lost time, captured in the ageless steel shell of a host, _and_ he represented time yet to be, all of Arnold’s hopes—his silly, frivolous wishes—for the future, embodied. It wasn’t too late to make things right between them. He had to believe that.

At first, Robert didn’t know what to say. They’d never modeled a host on a real person. Not so explicitly, anyway.

“‘My only happy memory of my childhood.’ That’s what you said,” Arnold told Robert. “I’m giving it back to you. So you see, Robert? You’re wrong. Our best days are still ahead of us, after all . . .”

Robert did see, then, exactly as Arnold had intended, and when they kissed, overcome with passion of a vintage both old and new, the little host Robert bore sole witness.

If only, in the long run, what Arnold believed had proven true.


End file.
